Differential Evolution and swarm intelligence techniques for analog circuit synthesis

This paper presents an application of different variants of differential evolution (DE) and swarm intelligence techniques for analog circuit synthesis. A CMOS Miller operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) that satisfies certain design specifications is designed as a case study. Two important swarm intelligence techniques namely artificial bee colony (ABC) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are used for this problem. The optimization of CMOS parameters are carried out using evolutionary algorithms in MATLAB interfaced with WINSPICE circuit simulator. Chaotic DE algorithms are used for performance comparison along with ABC and PSO. The results show that all three evolutionary techniques are capable of designing the Miller OTA satisfying most of the design specifications. However chaotic DE algorithm performs better in terms of quality of solution, robustness and computational time as compared to standard DE, PSO and ABC algorithms.